Month: September 2013

Over the past eight years the FreePBX project has had many key team members coming and going as their business and personal lives changed. Today we announce the return of one of FreePBX’s former “lead singers”, Rob Thomas… well it’s not really Rob Thomas the singer, but Rob Thomas, the former project manager of FreePBX. Rob later passed the torch to Philippe Lindheimer who continues to lead it today.

Rob, also known as X-Rob or xrobau on IRC and the forums, has accepted a position with the Schmooze/FreePBX development team, and has already started working on some exciting new upcoming projects, some of which we’ll be sharing details about at Astricon 10 in Atlanta next month.

“Rob left the project 6 years ago to pursue other exciting projects at a time when FreePBX had no revenue model to sustain his full time involvement” said Philippe Lindheimer, FreePBX Project Lead. Since then the installed base has grown to over 1 million systems and continues to see 20 thousand FreePBX Distro installs each month. “When my current endeavors started to dry up, I expected I’d have to relocate my family to Brisbane or Sydney where the technology opportunities are in Australia” said Rob Thomas, “it’s hard to express my excitement and joy of seeing how the project has flourished to where Schmooze Com, Inc could bring me on to do what I love doing and be rejoined with FreePBX all the while being paid. I’ve always thought it was one of those amazing projects that has made a significant impact to people all over the world. I’m super happy to be coming home!”

During his hiatus for the last several years Rob has worked on various Open Source projects, as well as becoming a massive DevOps proponent. He’s been involved in some interesting projects, as well as working deeply with several distributed/cloud technologies such as OpenStack, CEPH and Puppet. He’s also discovered Roller Derby and is often seen running around the track whistling at girls and writing down their numbers.

In the VoIP arena, he’s been doing some equally cool things, such as designing and building highly-available FreePBX Based VoIP Systems for enterprise (500+ seat) customers. He’s also supported many Asterisk and Freeswitch VoIP customers from small local businesses to carrier grade providers throughout the world. He’s kept up with FreePBX, maintaining a few casual modules and assisting with the occasional bug fix from historical code he’s written.

We are really excited to have Rob back and look forward to the outside experience and history that he brings into the project. Please join us by welcoming Rob back as part of the team!

Join us in Atlanta October 8-10th, 2013 at the Renaissance Waverly Place Hotel and Convention Center for the 10th anniversary of Astricon! the Asterisk Open Source Conference and Expo

This year the FreePBX Project will be a gold sponsor of Astricon and FreePBX Lead Developer, Philippe Lindheimer, will be participating in a keynote with Mark Spencer, the creator of Asterisk and Founder of Digium, on Wednesday starting at 9:15 AM titled “Asterisk: Views from the Community Front Line”, as well as many of the developer sessions, and the Asterisk Based Distro Session starting at 2:25 PM on Wednesday.

The FreePBX/ Schmooze team will also be present on the exhibit floor, and at many of the sponsored networking events, as well as a few after hours networking events.

If you wish to schedule a dedicated time to speak with our team in Atlanta, please fill out our online contact form and we can arrange a meeting. http://schmoozecom.com/contact.php